Vehicle update:I got my truck fixed, new solenoid, starter, batteryM and relay. Now the block is leaking coolant. It runs, but it needs a gallon of antifreeze every forty miles or so.

Two days after I got the alternator installed in my focus and the motor back in, the clutch went out in the camaro.

I got woken up at four this morning by a police officer banging on my door to let me know my focus had slipped out of gear and rolled partially into the street. Naturally, the guy who hit it didn't have insurance.

I've also had two more flat tires since my last update, one on the highway, when I ran over a wire, and one when someone stuck a 10mm combination wrench through the sidewall in a filling station parking lot. I have no idea who did it or why.

I am still waiting on my DeVille back from the mechanic, and still driving his ginormous loaner Suburban meanwhile. It's now approaching three months since the coolant leak that turned out to be a cracked block (which is what's being repaired now) surfaced, most of which I've been without my car, following the previous two months with only a gap of a week between them where it I was without it for that intractable electrical problem. Basically five months almost entirely without my car. If it hadn't been for loaners from the mechanic I'd just be boned.

(sidenote: I might possibly finally be getting my car back tomorrow, but that's not what I came here to talk to you about. I came to talk about the draft.)

I just realized doing a little mental math on ideas to more succinctly pique interest in the Chronicles that if you were to make a movie trailer for it and give each component story 20 seconds of screen time in that trailer, said "trailer" would be feature length at 81 minutes. To fit it into the maximum MPAA-approved movie trailer length that I just googled of 2.5m, each story could only get about 0.6s of screen time.

Well as you can see I have it structured as 9 seasons of 27 episodes each right now. Not that I actually have any actionable plans to make TV out of this, just in the pipe dream scenario I'm writing for.

What structure are you thinking for that 3 season x 9 episode version? Just compress each nine "episodes" as I have them structured now into one episode, in the same order they are now?

So episode 1 starts with the Valhalla crew crashing to Asiron for a few mins, then jumps around Darak and John's stories for a few mins each, cycling around through all of their stories until it ends with Darak quest for Mav taking off, the Valhalla crew reaching the Asiron ship, and John departing with Thomas' crew. It would not yet be clear how these stories are related, though the reappearance of the symbol of Meij / the Foundation / the Eldest (and, as I've recently decided, the language of the Ehrban / the Pantheon / the Sphidian magic system, which are all the same) makes clear that they are all related somehow. But that would be the only episode that is that confusing.

By the end of episode 2, not only do we have the background for all three of those stories, each told linearly in one segment of a kind of anthology episode, but it would also be clear that the world of Sphidia is inside the Virtuality system on Earth, though we don't know when the Darklight stories are in relation to the Foundation stories.

By the end of episode 3, not only do we have the resolutions of all three of those stories, again each told linearly in one segment of a kind of anthology episode, but it would also be clear that the world of Niarba is just another planet in the same universe as Earth, though we don't know when the Meij stories are in relation to the Foundation stories.

Episodes 4, 5, and 6 are just the whole of Falling of the Darklight, Shadow of the Foundation, and Lievus Meij, fleshing our the background history for the worlds of the three stories concluded in the previous episode, one world at a time.

Then in episodes 7, 8, and 9, which are just the whole of Meij Endaren, Light of the Foundation, and Rising of the Darklight respectively, we see: the Nurbal depart Niarba to who knows where but fearing a possible encounter with the Berol; then their arrival at Earth with the Berol war fleet in pursuit and the unresolved apparent end of humanity; and then the promise of the salvation of Sphidia which we should by now understand is possibly the last remnant of humanity following the aforementioned end of the world, except that promise is not fulfilled and the Queen of Hell seems to destroy the last scrap of anything left of humanity and possibly the galaxy depending on the unknown fate of the Ehrban. End season 1.

Open season 2: an episode framed by events in an apparently un-fallen World Ring, but set on Earth long before its destruction, following the construction of Virtuality, in Birth of Another World. Then another episode following that same plot thread in Life in Another World... but damnit what happened after the destruction of Earth!?!? A third episode in that thread, Death and the Other World, finally catching up to the apocalypse, good good now what happens after that...

Ah Metis is alive and on an Earth that's not destroyed and... just talking a lot about stuff that happened twelve thousand years ago. But okay this is cool and probably relevant, the origins of the Foundation in Pantheon Genesis. Then skipping quickly forward through history in Pantheon Exodus good looks like we'll get back to the present soon. And finally we're building the Internation and almost back to the present in Pantheon Synthesis good. Okay we know what happens after that so we skip over that stuff and now we see what happens after the end of the world next episode?

No? Just Amouch somewhere somewhen, meditating on the distant past again, in Magic of Antiquity? Okay but it's about Keius Meij, this guy is famous and like responsible for all the shit happening in the galaxy, this has to be important to how the world doesn't end. Good an episode about how the galaxy got how it is with mages and Asiron and the discovery of humanity in Children of Antiquity. And then the first galactic war and the origins of the Berol and Keius' mysterious departure from Earth in War of Antiquity. This has to tie in to how the world doesn't end. ...next season I guess? Because this one's over already.

Open season 3: the Nurbal have just left Niarba and established their own settlement in Nurbal Colony. Okay good we're getting close to the important action again, this will be the story of how the war with the Berol got restarted and reached Earth and then we have to finally see how that gets resolved. Another episode in that vein, Nurbal Legacy good we're getting there. And now Nurbal Enemy yes we're finally back to the action and seeing what happens afterward but the focus moves away from Earth and we still don't know what happens after the Moon gets exploded damnit stop teasing

FINALLY a season and a half later we are back on Earth after the destruction of the Moon! Metis is alive! Other humans are alive! She is rebuilding civilization in Columbia Resurgent hurray! And she continues to do that in Terra Resurgent! And by the end of Sol Resurgent we even find out what's going on in the rest of the galaxy awesome everything is finally back on track for the climax!

And then, at last, the climax. In Virtuality Transcendent we pick up with Tom and Xiu and the ruins of Sphidia only to get our minds fucked with and everything the last three episodes established thrown into doubt. But then in Virtuality Incarnate it seems like those doubts are unfounded and everything might work out after all. At least until holy shit it barely almost doesn't work out for anyone at all in Virtuality Immanent. The end.

I was thinking that nine years was a long Tim to have to remember three storylines. If everything were released at once, that would be fine, but I don't think you'd have much of an audience buy the end if each season was released as it was filmed like most shows do. A lot of shows can be started watching in the middle, but this one would be very confusing.

Also, I've never watched nine seasons of any show, even ones I started out enjoying, I was tired of them by the fifth season. I'm sure some people would watch it, and some people just have television playing on the background without paying attention, so they wouldn't mind, but I think three seasons would be easier.Although, that really compresses a lot of the content more than I'd realised. Maybe have more episodes per season.

It might make for uneven production values and confusing casting, but you could crowd-source the filming. People would sign up to produce and direct one episode, like fan fiction, and when they are all done, they are released at a marathon one episode per day rate. It's about one year of Randix - Daveandix Monday-Friday back-to-back new episodes.

Wonder what YouTube and CrowdFund would think of it.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

Something like that (minus the inconsistent shoestring budget production quality and casting) is kind of my dream fantasy scenario for the project, if I had unlimited funding to hire people to make it for me. I'd have one person in charge of each saga (Ehrban, Oumen, Sphidi) setting the tone and vision for their saga and overseeing consistency of that within it, and all three reporting to me so I can maintain consistency of tone and vision across the whole project. But each of them would have a sub-person in charge of each series of that saga (e.g. Pantheon, Foundation, and Resurgent people would report to the Oumen division head) with their own unique take on the tone and vision for it, subject to consistency with the tone and vision of the saga division head they report to, in turn subject to me. And so on down the line until each episode (or perhaps not that far down, maybe each 9-episode named story? which is only one layer deeper than series, now that I think about it) has a person in charge of all of its details, subject to consistency with the person above them, and so on.

I'm not familiar with that soundtrack, I'll have to look it up. I was thinking of the aforementioned Fountain OST and Nightfall in Middle Earth for the instrumental/operatic inspiration.

I was imagining CG rendered images, because I've imagined the video form of the story being largely CG given its nature, but photographs with CG added might also be an idea given that the video form could also take that format. Possibly, for added distinctiveness, the images wouldn't all have to be of the same medium; some could be drawings, paintings, photographs, CG, etc, with media themed to match the part of the story it's depicting.

Been watching a lot of Westworld lately, and really feeling vibes of my Otherworld series (which is only coincidentally named) and the Sphidi saga generally (the whole not-knowing-they're-in-a-virtual-world angle of the Darklight series and Virtuality Transcendent). Especially (Westworld season 2 finale spoiler)

Spoiler:

that portal to the virtual paradise that the hosts are fleeing through, and the way it suddenly blinks out of existence, made me imagine my scene at the end of Death and the Other World, where Xio has opened a portal between "heaven" and "hell", and while everyone is panicking and arguing in "hell", the portal to "heaven" just quietly vanishes, as the rest of Virtuality and probably all of human civilization unceremoniously blinks out of existence, leaving only this little preserved pocket of "hell" to survive.

Something tonight inspired me to write out my schedule of little-things-to-do-each-week-to-get-my-shit-finally-done, and the conclusion of that was a projection of how long I expect it to take to finish properly writing the Chronicles, ish, in nine volumes of about 180k words each, so each series of stories (e.g. the Antiquity series) within each volume is itself about the length of a short novel, and the whole volume is about the length of an average scifi/fantasy novel. Spoilers: it's gonna be for fucking ever, if I can even manage to keep up the pace I've been working on things the past few years. Pretty much literally the rest of my life.

(This year and next are set aside for all the other things, like Eternal and the Codex, that I won't ever have time to work on if I go whole hog on the Chronicles).

2020 Feb wk1 Nadir of the Darklight part 12020 Feb wk2 Veil of the Foundation part 12020 Feb wk3 Darak Meij part 1

2020 Mar wk1 Darak Meij part 32020 Mar wk2 Veil of the Foundation part 32020 Mar wk3 Nadir of the Darklight part 3

2020 Apr Falling of the Darklight2020 May Shadow of the Foundation2020 Jun Lievus Meij2020 Jul Meij Endaren2020 Aug Light of the Foundation2020 Sep Rising of the Darklight

2020 Oct Veil of the Foundation part 22020 Nov Darak Meij part 22020 Dec Nadir of the Darklight part 22021 Jan Nadir of the Darklight part 12021 Feb Veil of the Foundation part 12021 Mar Darak Meij part 12021 Apr Darak Meij part 32021 May Veil of the Foundation part 32021 Jun Nadir of the Darklight part 3

2021 Jul Veil of the Foundation part 2 ep22021 Aug Darak Meij part 2 ep22021 Sep Nadir of the Darklight part 2 ep22021 Oct Nadir of the Darklight part 2 ep12021 Nov Veil of the Foundation part 2 ep12021 Dec Darak Meij part 2 ep12022 Jan Darak Meij part 2 ep32022 Feb Veil of the Foundation part 2 ep32022 Mar Nadir of the Darklight part 2 ep3

On the topic of inspiring music, and Westworld/Otherworld connections, I've been listening to the Westworld soundtrack a lot lately, and their rendition of Radiohead's "Exit Music (For A Film)" brings to my mind tearful images of the end of the Otherworld series, the same part I spoke of two posts ago -- with Xio standing there holding open the portal between heaven and hell, begging Met to cross over to heaven and then when she refuses pleading with the people of heaven to join them in hell if they want to survive at all, and as commotion and argument breaks out among the would-be survivors who crossed over to hell, everything on the other side of the portal unceremoniously vanishes. The mortal world is gone, and all the better of the immortal realms with it, and this little bit of hell is all that's left, all because Xio can't forgive himself for a sin he committed twelve thousand years ago, can't give up on the one whom he wronged and abandon her to oblivion, and she meanwhile just wants to see him and his precious humanity suffer for his crimes until the day that they blink unceremoniously out of existence too.